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"From content consumption to content creation, there are many ways to use mobile devices with students. They can create how-to videos for authentic audiences, explain their thinking through screencasting, or use scannable technology in the math classroom, for example. Mobile devices can also be used to help students practice foundational math skills and build their math fluency. You might decide to use an app on this list as part of an intervention plan or add it to a newsletter for families."

"In India, 41km of highway road was constructed every day for the year of 2016. In the Indian government budget, it estimated the cost just for 2016 to be 19 billion USD. It would be financing any shortfall through tax-free government bonds. Computational thinking would have played an instrumental role in deciding on where the road would go through with taking into account the key hubs and may have saved the government millions, if not billions of dollars. Jeanette Wing (2012) defines computational thinking as the thought process involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution in a way that a computer-human or machine can effectively carry out. It is the process of abstraction by; choosing the right abstractions, operating in terms of multiple layers of abstraction simulations and defining the relationships between layers guided by efficiency, correctness, and flexibility. Computational thinking can best be related to as writing software or instructionals. Every action or non-action is accounted for in the way computational artifacts are constructed. Computational thinking is great for working out a solution but there is an argument that computational thinking does not put enough emphasis on the problem itself. Design thinking, on the other hand, attempts to understand the intent or problem before looking at any solution - computational or otherwise. Design thinking attempts to identify why the problem exists in the first place before solving it. IDEO defines design thinking as the application of empathy and experimentation to arrive at innovation solutions through making decisions based on stakeholder input and evidence based research. Using the Indian roading example, a design thinker would ask, what is the intent of building the roads in the first place?"

"Until recently, Facebook had dominated the social media landscape among America's youth - but it is no longer the most popular online platform among teens, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, roughly half (51%) of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they use Facebook, notably lower than the shares who use YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat. This shift in teens' social media use is just one example of how the technology landscape for young people has evolved since the Center's last survey of teens and technology use in 2014-2015. Most notably, smartphone ownership has become a nearly ubiquitous element of teen life: 95% of teens now report they have a smartphone or access to one. These mobile connections are in turn fueling more-persistent online activities: 45% of teens now say they are online on a near-constant basis."

Every year, Time magazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convinced their product deserves to be included in Time's "25 Best Inventions" list. This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot named Jibo. Jibo - a so-called "social robot" - is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they're already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile. And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture."

"As a parent, you are on top of things. Your day includes making sure your kids eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep each night of the week. You also coordinate their school schedules with extra-curricular activities, and you balance family obligations so that everyone can participate. That work includes coordinating play dates, dental exams, medical checkups, and more. Making healthy choices isn't just for you; it's also for your children. Parents set the example by being good role models for their children. Some families enjoy cooking or working out together, and others encourage each other to explore individual healthy pursuits. Parents take charge of their children's physical, emotional, spiritual, and social health. What about your child's digital health?"

"As educators, we hold a captive audience with our students. Our fear becomes our students' fear, and our calm becomes their calm. Of course this is a burden that we have to carry. When most of us signed up to be teachers or administrators, we didn't think that we would have to lead our students through events like 9/11, natural disasters, school shootings, and pandemics. But we do, and the reality is that this a burden we have to carry. We hold captive audiences whether we like it or not. But it is also an extraordinary gift that we can be an example of peace and calm in our students' lives. We can't control the hysteria they see on the news or experience at home. We cannot guarantee them safety and health. The superpowers of educators have limits. However, we can model what it means to be calm and collected. We can express our fears and vulnerabilities, but do it in a way that inspires hope and resolve for our students. "

"Since as early as the 1800's, fears of robots taking over human jobs has been a reality. As we enter the true age of robotics, those concerns are resurfacing, and educators are unsure about what jobs their students will be competing for. For example, IT jobs will grow by 22% through 2020 and jobs in STEM are said to see similar growth. Educators are expected to equip their students with skills that will translate into careers and yet they have no idea what these skills should be. While timeless skills such as critical thinking, languages and mathematics aid in every career they do not provide the specialized skills that "jobs of the future" may require. So, what are the jobs of the future and how can be best prepare students for them?"

"Turtle Academy makes it surprisingly easy to start creating amazing shapes using the LOGO language Here are some examples for easy and fun programming"

"In what ways do Scratch and visual & media arts inform one another? How can Scratch be a platform for artistic expression and vice versa? Can visual and media arts help introduce and extend computational creativity? Together, Scratch and art have limitless potential for learning and creating! We've started assembling Resources and Scratch Projects and we'd love your input! Do you have  lesson plans, activities, websites, videos, example projects, or something else to share?"

"Students in Grade 3 created their own I Spy pages. The items were gathered from yard sales, usually by the bag full, for a few dollars, and put through the dishwasher. The first class was spent exploring 'I Spy' books and arranging the items onto colourful card. I had 9 baskets of items so small groups or pairs each photographed the same designs but did their own clues. During the second class period, students cropped their photos and used PicCollage App to add clues. Image quality is an issue with closeups with our iPad 2s. Other classes will try to find the items in the images and they were included in a school assembly video.  Continue reading to see more examples."

"I am a big fan of music in the history classroom and I have created a number of Spotify Playlists for this purpose. Often this is merely to help create a calm and purposeful working atmosphere, when a bit of Chopin or Debussy sets the tone perfectly. Occasionally it's even possible to have calming instrumental music directly related to the topic in question: for example, Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, which was inspired by the composer watching British troop ships heading off to France in 1914. However, some songs are better used to stoke up some energy during lessons, whilst the very best of all are historical sources in themselves, combining musical feeling with powerful lyrical content. What follows is a list of songs I regularly use in class, organised in broadly chronological order in terms of the topics they relate to, with a brief explanation of how you could make use of them with your own students. What follows is a list of 25 principal songs, but with links to others on similar themes or by similar artists, bringing the total up to over 50. If you have any other suggestions, please contact me (@russeltarr / @activehistory on Twitter) and I'd be delighted to add them to the list (as long as it isn't "We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel. Which I admit is superb, but we all know this one, surely?)."

"Exit tickets or cards are informal assessment tools teachers can use to assess students understanding at the end of a class. They can also be used for formative assessment purposes to help teachers design better instructional content based on students feedback. Exit tickets can take the form of a prompt or a question related to what have been taught in the lesson. Here are some examples of questions and prompts to use in your exit cards as featured in "

"If you'd asked farmers a few hundred years ago what skills their kids would need to thrive, it wouldn't have taken long to answer. They'd need to know how to milk a cow or plant a field. General skills for a single profession that only changed slowly-and this is how it was for most humans through history. But in the last few centuries? Not so much. Each generation, and even within generations, we see some jobs largely disappear, while other ones pop up. Machines have automated much of manufacturing, for example, and they'll automate even more soon. But as manufacturing jobs decline, they've been replaced by other once unimaginable professions like bloggers, coders, dog walkers, or pro gamers. In a world where these labor cycles are accelerating, the question is: What skills do we teach the next generation so they can keep pace?"

"When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, "to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.""

"Drones do lots of good in the world, and the ways they can be used for good seem to be growing every day. (There's even a "UA Drones for Good" competition held in Dubai every year.) Here is our list of some of the ways that drones are being used for good right now. Know of others? Reach out and let us know on Twitter using the hashtag #dronesforgood. We'd love to see this list grow!"

"It's time we considered the increasing impact of AI in education. Educators have already previewed examples of the changes coming their way. Automation technology has been introduced for a variety of basic teaching tasks."

One of the thinking moves that we hope our students will confidently engage with is centred around the disposition of uncovering complexity. As we endeavour to shift our students towards a deeper understanding, the capacity to uncover complexity is a vital step. However, the ability to uncover complexity is itself complex and an excellent example of a skill that is best achieved when considered as a disposition. 

"Looking for some great Raspberry Pi projects to do? Then you have found the right place. On this page, you will find plenty of tutorials ranging from simple beginner projects right through to the more advanced projects that require a fair bit more work. All these projects are a great way to learn more about both the fundamentals of the Raspberry Pi and also how a Linux operating system works. By doing some of these projects, you will even start to learn bash, PHP, Python and lots more programming & scripting languages. You will learn how to install and use some great tools, entertainment software, and much more. A few examples of what you could do include things such as a retro game emulator, network attached storage, cloud server and so much more."